musings from an informed urban planner and an uninformed TV writer

The Indian Premier League

Australian and Deccan Charger, Andrew Symonds

For the past several days, about 50% of the front page stories in The Hindu have been about the Indian Premier League, a relatively new professional cricket league. Between stories about the upcoming cricket finals and those about the scandal involving politicians, billionaires, and franchise bidding, I read about 10 IPL stories a day. Those got me wondering: what is life like for the foreign cricketers in the IPL? Do they like India? Is it hard? Is it fun?

Every team can have a maximum of eight foreign players, and only four of those can be in the playing eleven. These foreign players tend to be from Australia, South Africa, or England. And despite their numbers and popularity, I couldn’t find an article about any of these players’ lives in India. (My Internet search skills must be off, because “A Day with Andrew Symonds” type article seems like a no-brainer for an Indian Men’s magazine.) However I did find the twitter accounts for Shane Warne and Graeme Smith of the Rajasthan Royals.

Based on these Twitter feeds, it seems that the foreign players don’t do much except play cricket and sleep. In their defense, everyone’s lives seem boring and minutiae-filled on Twitter. Twitter could make a talking dog seem uninteresting. Also, the IPL season is only about two months long and I doubt most athletes do little more than practice and play video games. But I’m not going to stop imagining giant Australian men with zinc oxide on their lips, buying two hundred milk packets from a woman on the sidewalk every morning.